books.google.com - Jurassic Park meets The Hunger Games in this stunning new high-energy, high-concept tale from first-time novelist Ted Kosmatka, a Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLYSet in an amoral future where genetically engineered...https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Games.html?id=0ytgY_pFAVgC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareThe Games

Set in an amoral future where genetically engineered monstrosities fight each other to the death in an Olympic event, The Games envisions a harrowing world that may arrive sooner than you think.

Silas Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event. But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas's boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.

The result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears, can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a computer's cold logic.

Now Silas races to understand what the computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia Joćo. Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength, speed, and—most disquietingly—intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion: sheer terror.

Praise for The Games

“Blends the best of Crichton and Koontz.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - NineLarks - LibraryThing

Silas Williams in the head geneticist conceiving the next United States's gladiator for the Olympic Games, in this futurist world where genetic manipulation is commonplace and a spectacle. But little ...Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - NineLarks - LibraryThing

Silas Williams in the head geneticist conceiving the next United States's gladiator for the Olympic Games, in this futurist world where genetic manipulation is commonplace and a spectacle. But little ...Read full review

About the author (2012)

Ted Kosmatka was born and raised in northwest Indiana and spent more than a decade working in various laboratories there before moving to the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He now works in the videogame industry where he's a full-time writer at Valve, home of Half-Life, Portal and Dota 2.